I’ve been curious lately — how has Tesla coverage in the mainstream media evolved over time? Has Tesla coverage always been batshit crazy? Or is that a relatively new thing?
Last week, I wrote about dramatically negative press sentiment about Tesla that was prevalent 10 years ago. The company was sure to die any day, according to smart dudes at The Truth About Cars, the New York Times, and most outlets in between.
I recently interviewed a major auto executive. Below is an edited transcript of our interview.
Tesla CEO & Chairman Elon Musk is a wild man, a mad scientist who has lost his marbles, a gorilla ape gazillionaire who has brilliantly brainwashed the masses, a South African clone of Conor McGregor.
It’s not going to be popular with some of you, but I have to say, I’ve never liked Twitter. I see the value in it. I see its pros. But I think it crunches too much information down into one-liners and often takes away from deeper exploration and reflection. The constantly and quickly flowing stream of tweets makes every tweet fleeting. It’s a system built on such an excessive and fast information flow that it treats much of that information as useless. Maybe it is useless, but that just makes it more useless.
10 years ago, now-rabid CNBC didn’t know Tesla from your mother. Fox News was busy complaining that Obama encouraged people to keep their tires well inflated. Seeking Alpha? Well, I couldn’t find a single Tesla story on Seeking Alpha published in the month of August 2008. But some geniuses on a website called “The Truth About Cars” were onto something. They published episode #17 of their “Tesla Death Watch.”
Holy cow — have you seen the pictures?! There are thousands of cars sitting on lots across the United States — unsold.
My recent article “22 Ways To Delay The Electric Car Revolution” was hugely popular, but readers offered a lot more ideas and wanted me to take the list to 50, so here we are. To keep everything in one place, I’ve copy & pasted the original article here and then expanded … [continued]
